Mervyn Kopinsky, FSA, EA
Pete Miller, ASA, MAAA

The 2003 – 2014 Individual Life Mortality Experience dataset contains the combined experience of over 300 million policy exposure years, with almost 3 million death claims. The session will cover what’s in the data, how it has been collected, where to access it, how to analyze it (CSV files and Excel), and then give an overview of some of the results from the data and caveats about interpretation.

In January, the SOA released the U.S. Population Mortality Observations report, updated with 2016 experience. In addition to overall experience, the top 10 causes of death were covered as well as a section on opioid deaths. Mortality was analyzed over time (1999-2016), by gender and by income level. This session will cover the highlights of the report and discuss methodology.

Mervyn Kopinsky, FSA, EA recently joined the Society of Actuaries in a research position as an Experience Studies actuary. Mervyn has more than 25 years experience working as a consulting pension actuary. He is currently involved in researching the application of Predictive Modeling techniques to large data sets, as well as assisting the SOA with its ongoing experience studies. Mervyn is originally from South Africa where he graduated with an MSc. in statistics

Pete Miller, ASA, MAAA is an Experience Study Actuary with the Society of Actuaries. His primary responsibilities are for disability and long-term care studies. Prior to joining the SOA in August, 2015, Pete worked for PolySystems for nearly 14 years, where he primarily supported PolySystems’ experience study system, Measure. He also has a deep background in life insurance and annuity valuation from his previous employment at two insurance companies.